Still No Joy With Automated Test Feedback

This weekend I uploaded another version of XML::RSS::Tools onto CPAN. I copied some diagnostic code from XML::Simple, so I'd have a better idea of the modules any tester had on their machine, as XML::LibXML and it's libxml2 that it's based on have a complex existance.

As before it worked perfectly on my older machine at home, and I'll test it with my newer machines at work this week. For some reason, some CPAN tester is having problems. The problem is I can't email the person to ask for additional details, and the damn thing works perfectly well on all the machines I have access to.

The code I copied from XML::Simple now gives me an idea of the Perl modules this tester has, and to my surprise they are all pretty recent and up to date. I don't know what the version of libxml2 and libxslt that sit beneath. These libraries are under active development, so odd things happen to the API, things get added and moved around, even the Perl modules have to maintain a blacklist of library versions that don't work with them.

I understand that many people are busy, these tests are automated, and it's nice to get reports, but sometimes - as in this case - it's not very helpful...

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I tried at home last night and all seemed ok but at work this morning it isn't quite so happy. They are both running debian testing(the difference is possibly down to a different mix of cpan/debian modules).

I have added prints of $@ to catalog-test.t and the failures seem to be related to entities.

not ok 7# Failed test 7 in t/catalog-tests.t at line 39# t/catalog-tests.t line 39 is: ok (!($@));:17: parser error : Entity 'pound' not definedlligent news and comment throughout the day from The Guardian new

Most useful. I now know what failed, I just don't know why. This is a significant step in the right direction.

Do you know what the versions of libxml2 and libxslt you have on your machines? There are quite a few versions of these libraries, and they all have their own "issues", independent of the Perl module sitting on top of them.

At home my old Debian stable machine is okay, it runs the no-catalog.t test, it doesn't have catalog support so it doesn't attempt it. At work the catalog tests work fine on:

I'm quite perlexed. How can it work on one machine but not the other if they are so similar....? You couldn't run perl -V and let me know if there are any differences, and check the locale of both machine, in fact if you can think of any difference between them, that would be most helpful.

The only difference is for my machine at home I installed the tools tar by hand and only did the dependencies using CPAN.pm but for the work machine I installed everything using CPAN.pm.Also the machines may not be identical as I keep work more uptodate than home as at home I'm on dialup but at work I work I get to leverage the fact I work for the worlds largest isp.:)

According to the Changes file they didn't change the catalog interface between these versions. Obviously the module has had a lot of activity between these versions, so something else has been changed - could be the old pass behaviour was a fluke, and the new fail behaviour is correct.

I'll ask on the Perl-XML list to see what I can find. Again many thanks for this most useful debugging help.

Andrew Alakozow, on the Perl-XML list, suggested setting the XML_DEBUG_CATALOG environment variable to see if this helps show up a difference. If you have a minute, it would be nice to know if there is a difference between your working and failing machine.

Sorry probably wasn't clear. When I got home yesterday I update the libxml2 and libxml2-dev packages to the current debian testing versions. This means both machines have the same versions of the shared libraries. I then ran make test and the machine at home still passed. I pulled the latest version of XML::LibXML from cpan and updated from 1.56 to 1.58. When I reran make test for RSS Tools it now failed. I then installed XML::LibXML 1.56 and 1.58 to seperate directories and could see when I set PERL5LIB to

Sorry, I see what you mean. If you have time could you re-run the tests with the XML_DEBUG_CATALOG enironment variable set, and see if you get different results with the two different libraries. Something must have changed in XML::LibXML when they went to version 1.58, I just wish I knew what...